07 May 2013

Wins are an Imperfect Way to Measure Who is Best

Bill Parcells once uttered these words which have become a silly mantra.

You are what your record says you are.

Why
is this silly? I think there is a kernel of truth in Parcells
statement. Our current state is a product of what we have done, so in a
way we are what we were. However, this is a statement that is fraught
with potential error. What if the way in which we define ourselves and
others is an imperfect way of defining ourselves and others? What if
what we use to measure does not translate accurately what we are? Is
your record truly defining you.

We know that any statistic in
baseball, wins included, is an approximation of ability. You truly are
not measuring ability, you are measuring the impact of ability. Stats
are the imprint of the hand, not the hand. That imprint can have
errors. This is a known fact. OK, maybe some do not know this to be
true as I somehow spent much of Monday discussing why statistics are not
perfect definitions of ability.

Maybe a picture will help.

What
we have in the above diagram are really three components: ability,
fortune, and result. Ability is the grey circle full of components that
make up how well a team will perform. Fortune is represented by a
magnet as it contains elements like where balls go in the field or how
events stack up on each other, which can alter how well ability will
translate into an outcome. The result is simply that outcome.

Let’s step through this graphic piece by piece.

Ability
This
category can go by a lot of names, so we should not be too hung up on
whether I chose to name this the right thing. What I mean to put in
here is basically the sum result of active elements, items that we can
be informed about, items that we are able to change by choice. This
includes traditional concepts of team like talent, training, health, and
coaching; but also items that perhaps people do not think about as
much, such as scheduling. All of these elements affect how well a team
can perform. That level of performance is what we are trying to find
when we look to name a team the best at something. However, this is a
very difficult thing to measure. It may well be impossible to measure,
so we try to find a way to determine who has the best ability.

Result
The
way we try to figure this out is by converting ability into wins by the
way of runs scored and runs given. This is how we define the outcome
of a single game. With a sport where the best team won 60% of their
games and the worst won 34% of their games, it takes a pretty long
season to figure out which team is the best. This is not like football
where you can have a team flirt with perfection one way or another. In
baseball, you need a larger sample size than 16 to figure it all out.

Right?
Well, that is because wins are an imperfect measure of which team has
the most ability. Why is a single win not a sufficient way to measure
how good a team is?

Fortune
This is
another section to not get too bog down into what it is called. You can
call this component fortune, luck, chance, randomness, etc. Basically,
this grouping is what makes wins an imprecise measure of which team is
the best because it will affect how ability is converted into wins.
An example, Balls in Play.

This
is something we have all experienced multiple times playing this game
or watching it. One team is striking guys out left and right while
putting up an extra base hit every inning while the other team somehow
manages to have balls hit right to them when the opponent is in scoring
position and managing to have a wind aided ball carry just over the
fence. With our eyes, we see that the better team lost.

There is
nothing that can be trained or taught that can shift a hard hit line
drive straight to a second baseman versus five feet to the right. That
is the same amount of ability from the batter, but one ends in an out
and the other might turn into a double. That is an error in
conversion. The hope is that by playing 162 games that the noise that
the conversion error generates will be muted…that the signal (who is
better) emerges from the messy noise of wins and losses.

But What About the Post-season?
Well,
after using the entire season to figure out who the best teams are, we
do not have many options left. We accept a shorter schedule that will
award one of the best teams with a championship. The championship is
not designed to determine which team is truly the one with the best
ability, merely the best possible way to figure out who might be. One
game series will not figure out which is the better team, nor will seven
game series.

That is OK. We do not need the World Series to
definitively determine which team is best. It works merely in
determining who wins the most, which can be different from which team
has the most ability.

Restating It All
So,
the basic fact of this is that wins are an imperfect measure of the
best team. Ability does not neatly translate over to wins because there
are elements beyond ability that affect that conversion. That is OK.
With a long enough season, differentiation can be good enough to set up a
playoff among many of the best teams. A shortened post-season is fine
because trimming away the lesser teams and letting the best teams duke
it out is a sound approach. However, we know that the team with the
most wins is not automatically the best team. They might be, they might
not. And that is OK.

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Jon Shepherd - Founder/Editor@CamdenDepotStarted Camden Depot in the summer of 2007. By day, a toxicologist and by night a baseball analyst. His work is largely located on this site, but may pop up over at places like ESPN or Baseball Prospectus.

Matt Kremnitzer - Assistant Editor@mattkremnitzerMatt joined Camden Depot in early 2013. His work has been featured on ESPN SweetSpot and MASNsports.com.

Patrick Dougherty - Writer@pjd0014Patrick joined Camden Depot in the fall of 2015, following two years writing for Baltimore Sports & Life. He is interested in data analysis and forecasting, and cultivates those skills with analysis aimed at improving the performance of the Orioles (should they ever listen).

Nate Delong - Writer@OriolesPGNate created and wrote for Orioles Proving Ground prior to joining Camden Depot in the middle of 2013. His baseball resume includes working as a scorer for Baseball Info Solutions and as a Video Intern for the Baltimore Orioles. His actual resume is much less interesting.

Matt Perez - Writer@FanOfLaundryMatt joined Camden Depot after the 2013 season. He is a data analyst/programmer in his day job and uses those skills to write about the Orioles and other baseball related topics.

Joe Reisel - WriterJoe has followed the Norfolk Tides now for 20 seasons. He currently serves as a Tides GameDay datacaster for milb.com and as a scorer for Baseball Info Solutions (BIS). He is computer programmer/analyst by day.

Joe Wantz - WriterJoe is a baseball and Orioles fanatic. In his spare time, he got his PhD in political science and works in data and analytics in Washington DC.